The Vertigo of Late Modernity

Jock Young

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412935746, 9781412935739
• eBook ISBN: 9781446238943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Immersing himself in the whirling uncertainty of late modernity, confronting its odd deformities of essentialism and exclusion, Jock Young has produced a comprehensive account of contemporary trouble, anxiety, and transgression. If this is criminology-and it?s surely criminology of the best sort-it is a criminology able to account not just for crime and inequality, but for the cultural and the economic, for the existential and the ontological as well. Perhaps most importantly, it is a criminology designed to discover in these intersecting social dynamics real possibilities for critique, hope, and human transformation. Jock Young?s The Vertigo of Late Modernity is a work of sweeping-dare I say, dizzying-intellect and imagination.?

- Professor Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University, USA, and University of Kent, UK

?This is precisely what readers would expect from the author of two instant classics: a book that is bound to become the third. As is his habit, Jock Young launches a frontal attack on the ?commonsense? of social studies and its tacit assumptions - as common as they are misleading. Futility of the ?inclusion vs exclusion?, ?contented vs insecure?, or indeed ?normal vs deviant? oppositions in the globalised and mediatized world is exposed and the subtle yet thorough interpenetration of cultures and porosity of boundaries demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. The newly coined analytical categories, like chaos of rewards and chaos of identity, existential vertigo, bulimic society or conservative vs liberal modes of othering are bound to become an indispensable part of social scientific vernacular - and let?s hope that they will, for the sanity and relevance of the social sciences? sake?

- Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Leeds

?Jock Young is one of the great figures in the history of criminology. In this book he prises open paradoxes of identity in late modernity. We experience an emphasis on individualism in an era when shallow soil forms a foundation for self-development. Young deftly analyses shifts in conditions of work and consumption and the insecurities they engender. This is a perceptive reformulation of job, family and community in late modernity?

- Professor John Braithwaite, Australian National University

The Vertigo of Late Modernity is a seminal new work by Jock Young, author of the bestselling and highly influential book, The Exclusive Society.

In his new work Young describes the sources of late modern vertigo as twofold: insecurities of status and of economic position. He explores the notion of an underclass and its detachment from the class structure. The book engages with the ways in which modern society attempts to explain deviant behaviour - whether it be crime, terrorism or riots - in terms of motivations and desires separate and distinct from those of the ?normal?. Young critiques the process of othering whether of a liberal or conservative variety, and develops a theory of ?vertigo? to characterise a late modern world filled with inequality and division. He points toward a transformative politics which tackle problems of economic injustice and build and cherish a society of genuine diversity.

This major new work engages with some of the most important issues facing society today. The Vertigo of Late Modernity is essential reading for academics and advanced students in the areas of criminology, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and the social sciences more broadly.

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1

CROSSING THE BORDERLINE

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This book is about cultural borders, it is about borders set up and borders crossed: it is about borders steadfastly erected like some Weberian iron cage and about borders transgressed and broken, it is about borders which intimate difference and borders which facilitate vindictiveness. It is about borders which seem solid and secure, but blur, hybridise, and dissolve. It is about cultural borders which have long lost their fixed spatial moorings, where culture and place no longer have constancy. It is about borders whose normative bases seem at first glance firm, and yet are riven with contradiction and incoherence. It is, in short, about the condition of modernity today which Zygmunt Bauman (2000) calls liquid modernity – where all that is solid melts into air, in contrast to the high modernity of the post-war period where the stolid, weighty, secure work situations of Fordism, undergirded by the stable structures of family, marriage, and community, presented a taken for granted world of stasis and seeming permanency.

What has generated this liquid modernity, this fluidity of norm, institution, and social category so characteristic of our present period? The factors which have brought about this change are well known – mass migration and tourism, the ‘flexibility’ of labour, the breakdown of community, the instability of family, the rise of virtual realities and reference points within the media as part of the process of cultural globalisation, the impact of mass consumerism, and the idealisation of individualism, choice, and spontaneity. Many of these are far from new, think of mass migration particularly in the United States where it is a key component of its development. Some of the most significant texts in classical sociology have talked about the impact of such forces. For example, Frederich Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England (1969 [1844]) graphically documents the miserable work conditions, family breakdown and social disintegration in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester. Or Durkheim’s Division of Labour (1951 [1893]), which charts the anomie and rampant individualism consequent on the rapid industrialisation of France at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Indeed some of these developments characterise mid- to late-nineteenth-century capitalism and industrialisation as much as they do our late modern world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some, however, although with us throughout modernity, have been ratcheted up in the present period and have become a qualitatively different presence. Take, for example, the role of the mass media where its immense proliferation, its speed and immediacy, its technological advances and its global reach have transformed our existence. Lived experience, once localised and immediate has now become irrevocably interlaced with mediated experience (see Thompson, 1995). Virtual reference points, narratives, fictional and non-fictional, permeate every aspect of our lives. Such a commonality is despatialised, rapid and ever-present. Nor is the impact of the rise of such a mediated society limited to lived experience, it also profoundly affects and undermines our notions of the fixity and concreteness of social concepts. As Jeff Ferrell puts it, ‘One of the great social interactionist insights of the last century – that meaning resides not in the thing itself, but in surrounding social and cultural processes – takes on even greater complexity and importance in a world where mass-produced symbols now circulate endlessly amidst the situated experiences of everyday life.’ (2006, p. 270). And, as we shall see, such a contested, problematic social reality has resonances not only in the phenomenology of everyday life, but on the tenability and credibility of the social sciences.

Or, if we turn to individualism, we see similarly transformations of its nature and impact. Eric Hobsbawm, in his magisterial Age of Extremes (1994) characterises the late-twentieth century as experiencing a cultural revolution of an unparalleled nature. The American Dream of material comfort and the suburbs becomes replaced with a First World Dream extending across the world – harbouring the desires of the privileged and the envy of the rest. Here the point is not brute comfort and material success, but self-discovery and expression, it is not so much arrival as becoming and self-fulfilment, not of hard work rewarded, but of spontaneity and expressivity anew. The comfort-seeking creature of post-war modernity is replaced by the striving subject of late modernity. And if Durkheim’s warnings of the mal d’infiniti in the late nineteenth century, or Merton’s admonition of the incessant nature of material goals in the America of the 1930s (an aspect of his work sadly neglected), conveyed the notion of the human spirit always striving but never fulfilled, heightened individualism in an era of mass consumerism has granted it an even greater resonance today. We are therefore confronted with a combination of factors, some long existing yet unique in their combination, others pre-existent yet transformed in the present period. The impact revolves around three axes, the disembeddedness of everyday life, the awareness of a pluralism of values, and an individualism which presents the achievement of self-realisation as an ideal.

The disembededness of everyday life

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Liquid modernity generates a situation of disembeddedness. This has dual levels: social and individual. Culture and norms become loosened from their moorings in time and place: normative borders blur, shift, overlap, detach. And this precariousness is experienced on a personal level. The individual feels disembedded from the culture and institutions he or she finds themselves in. And to such a situation is presented a pluralism of values: migration, tourism, the mass media and most importantly the variety of indigenous subcultures within society that carry with them the constant nagging awareness that things could be done differently, that we could make different choices. And here it is often small differences, differences of a minor kind which are more disconcerting than norms which are manifestly distinct and somewhat alien. Finally, self-realisation, the notion of constructing one’s own destiny and narrative, becomes a dominant ideal. There is, overall, a sense of detachment from the taken for granted social settings and with it an awareness of a situation of choice and freedom. So that which was once experienced as a thing – monumental and independent of human artifice – becomes de-reified and the social construction of reality is glimpsed particularly poignantly in everyday life, especially alarmingly at moments of personal crisis or sudden change.

All of this creates great potentialities for human flexibility and reinvention. Yet it generates at the same time considerable ontological insecurity – precariousness of being. To start with, the bases of identity are less substantial: work, family, community, once steadfast building blocks, have become shaky and uncertain. At no stage in history has there been such a premium on identity, on constructing a narrative of development and discovery, yet where the materials to construct it are so transient and insubstantial. But it is not merely the instability of work, family and community which make the writing of such a narrative difficult, it is the nature of the building blocks themselves. Work in particular is a locus of disappointment – it is the site of meritocratic ideals, of notions of reward and social mobility commensurate with effort, which very frequently it fails to deliver. It is the supposed font of self-realisation yet all too usually a mill of tedium. It is the workhorse of a consumerism which evokes self-realisation and happiness, but which all too frequently conveys a feeling of hollowness, and neverending extravagance, where commodities incessantly beguile and disappoint. Even the real thing seems a fake.

Work does not merely sustain family life, it manifestly intrudes upon it. It is the long commute which cuts into both ends of the day, and where the family becomes the place of tiredness and worn nerves. For the middle class, work is the price to pay for the sparkling family home and the help to clean it and take care of the children while the dual career family is out at work, yet in a strange sense it is often more of an image than a reality. It is real in the glossy magazines of home and garden, it is a caricature in reality. For the working poor, it is the two jobs which make life sustainable, while curtailing family and community, it is time off from seeing one’s own children and very often it is the time taken to look after the children of others. None of this should deny for an instant the perennial human joys of companionship of work, marriage and partnership, raising children and the comforts of neighbourliness. It is simply to note that it is precisely these parts of human fulfilment that suffer most … the shoe pinches where it is needed most.

What one finds in late modernity is a situation of contradiction and of paradox. The major institutions have both repressive and liberative potentials. The mass media, for example, carries hegemonic messages justifying the status quo of power – yet constantly in news story and fiction points to the blatant failure and unfairness of the world (see Young, 1981). Cultural globalisation propagates the tinsel values of Hollywood, yet it also carries notions of meritocracy, equality, and female emancipation, while in its global reach and its implosiveness, it serves to stress the interconnections and commonality of the world across economic and social borders (see Thompson, 1995). Even consumerism, as Paul Willis has so ably argued in Common Culture (1990) not only sells lifestyle but generates a popular and autonomous demand for individualism and lifestyle of choice which develops, so to speak, on the back of the market place.

Disembeddedness, fluidity, can create the possibilities of seeing through the present institutional set up, of discarding the old traditions, of respect for authority which justify the status quo, of wealth and social division. It thus holds the possibility of a redistributionist approach to social justice and deconstructive approach to identity, yet it can paradoxically offer just the opposite: an acceptance of the world as it is, a mode of ‘realism’ and an essentialist notion of identity built around one’s position of class, gender, ethnicity, place and nation. The outcome is not inevitable or, for that matter, random, but is a product of particular social and political configurations. Of great importance here are perceptual factors, that is the degree to which the basis of economic and social differentials are transparent. In particular I focus upon what I call the chaos of reward and the chaos of identity. As I will argue, the decline of manufacturing industries, the phenomenon of outsourcing, of core and peripheral work personnel, of freelance consultants and advisors, of a proliferating service industry of small restaurants, cafés, childcare and housework – all of these together make the comparison of rewards less obvious. The awareness of class distinction and inequalities was more obvious in the large Fordist bureaucracies of the post-war period, it becomes less tangible in late modernity – all that remains is a generalised feeling of unfairness, a failure of meritocracy which is underscored by widespread redundancies and changes in career. As for identity, the ideal of self-development, of a narrative of self-discovery and personal achievement is difficult in a world where the building blocks seem so insubstantial and contested. All of this makes the creation of a personal narrative difficult. It breeds a feeling of incoherence of half-realised awareness and contradiction. It is not surprising then that at no time in human history has such a recourse been made to fictionalised narratives – the worlds of the soap opera, the thriller, and the romantic novel, a world where there is a beginning, a middle, and an end, a story of substance and fulfilment albeit in a virtual reality.

The genesis of othering

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In real life the narrative of life pales beside the narrative of fiction or the ideals of meritocracy, self-fulfilment – the First World Dream. Our narratives seem unfair – they are frequently broken and discontinuous, they have no ending. None of this adds up to a satisfying account, a good story – rather it makes for a feeling of incoherence and bittiness, edged with strong emotions of unfairness both in terms of just reward and social recognition. Note also, it does not make for a neat narrative to be discovered by the diligent researcher: a clear, crisp story to be uncovered and revealed. Yet the longing for existential security, for certainty and solidity often exacerbated by the experience of denigration and stigmatisation remains. So, just as barriers are demolished and rendered permeable, new barriers are erected in the false hope of creating rigidity and secure difference. Such a generation of hiatus of rigid distinctions is seen in many spheres of human activity. Most clearly it is seen in cultural essentialism where, in the process of othering, the self is granted a superior ontology, whether based on class, gender, race, nationality, or religion, and is valorised, given certainty in contrast with the other. Two modes of othering are prevalent: the first is a conservative demonisation which projects negative attributes on the other and thereby grants positive attributes to oneself. The second, very common yet rarely recognised, is a liberal othering where the other is seen to lack our qualities and virtues. Such a lacking is not seen, as in the conservative version, as an essential and qualitative difference so much as a deficit which is caused by a deprivation of material or cultural circumstances or capital. They would be just like us if these circumstances improved. Thus, whereas for the conservative difference is rendered a perversion, or perhaps an inversion, of normality, for the liberal it is rendered a deviance from a lacking of the normal.

Liberal othering focuses largely on the poor constituted as an underclass, who are seen as being a fairly homogenous group. The poor are seen as disconnected from us, they are not part of our economic circuit: they are an object to be pitied, helped, avoided, studied, but they are not in a social relationship with us. The poor are perceived as a residuum, a superfluity, a dysfunction of a system. Their lives are a product of material or moral determinism, which accentuates the miserable and unsatisfactory nature of their lives. They are not a site of creativity, joy or expressivity – but of a bleak and barren scenario which contrasts with the taken-for-granted satisfactions of the mainstream world.

Let me summarise the key components of liberal othering. ‘They’ – which is predominantly constituted as ‘the poor’ – are not so much different from us as suffering from a material or moral deficit, so rather they are a lacking from us. Their crime and deviance is the main focus of the othering, their ‘normal’ activities, for example their pattern of work and legal informal economies, are rendered invisible (e.g. the working poor). Their deviance is seen as a product of this deficit that can be remedied through education and the opportunity of work so as to make up the shortfall of the deficit. Our response to them is therefore not that of demonisation but of actuarial avoidance and judicious help. They are not connected to us either materially or symbolically, rather they are a residuum, separate from us spatially, socially and morally. There are therefore two moments in othering: diminishing (they are less than us) and distancing (we have no direct social relationship with them).

Both conservative and liberal othering have in common the notion of a gulf between ‘them’ and ‘us’, a distancing, and both gain strength for the centre by diminishing the moral nature of the margins. The difference is that conservative othering involves the notion of suggesting that the deviant is alien – an inversion of ‘our’ values while liberal othering stresses a lacking, a deficit of value. Correspondingly, whereas conservatives focus on policies which are punitive or exclusionary, liberals focus on inclusionary measures which are educational and rehabilitative. However, importantly, in both modes the deviant does not threaten order, rather the deviant – whether internal or external to our society – helps to shore up order. Othering, then, is a key process which maintains order. I wish to argue that this late modern binary, in either of these modes, permeates public thinking and official discourse about deviants in our midst and extends to images of other cultures, countries, nationalities and religions and, with it, notions of immigration and population movement. Further, that such a binary is pivotal in much social scientific thinking, not only in the conceptualisation of the other and the deviant, but in the production of knowledge itself.

Ontological insecurity then gives rise to the search for clear lines of demarcation, crisp boundaries in terms of social groups (both in terms of the othering of deviants and conventional notions of multiculturalism and ethnic distinctions). On the level of the social sciences, this is reproduced in the search for clear definitions and in the assertion of an objectivity which suggests a gulf between the investigator and the investigated, together with the denial that any social relationship occurs across this hiatus with the implication of the rationality and integrity of the culture of the investigator and the relative irrationality and unsubstantiveness of the investigated.

The attractions of hiatus

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Thus such a binary notion of human nature and social order extends throughout notions of ontology and sociology, into areas of social scientific epistemology and method. It was while working on The Exclusive Society (1999) that I encountered this problem of hiatus and dualism so characteristic of the social condition of late modernity. It is inherent in the particular notion of social exclusion as isolation – of a segment of the population being physically and morally excluded from the mainstream, detached from the body of ‘normal’ or ‘middle’ class people and above by impermeable physical and social barriers. It is encountered in the accompanying notion of cultural difference, whether expressed in the form of cultures alien to our own or more commonly cultures which lack our rationality and solidity. It is implied by the ontological or essential differences between people: it occurs in notions of cultural globalisation, where the dominant cultures of the First World are seen as being initially hermetically separate from the cultures of the Third World, and that these pristine worlds of difference are simply obliterated by global forces, as if there was a time quite recently when they were ‘uncontaminated’ and a time soon when they will disappear. It is the rhetoric behind the clash of civilisations where orientalist notions of the world conjure up an apocalyptic battle as if those ‘civilisations’ could possibly have been miraculously separate. It is the central weakness of much methodology in the social sciences which seeks to set up definitions of social entities as if they were akin to animal species having some Linnaean separateness or essence, a unique DNA, which we can simply grasp by an act of systematic description. Thus we ask ‘what is terrorism?’ as if it were a fact out there and not a function of our phenomenological view, our perceptual position and does not blur irredeemably with conventional warfare. And the same, of course, is true of attempted definitions of all social categories; think of violence, pornography, prostitution, rape, the gang, or indeed suicide. A belief that there is some hiatus between the conventional and the deviant – clearly criticised by Durkheim in his elegant discussion of the blurring of the concept of suicide and underscored by his evocation of the society of saints, where lines of delineation are subject to change over time, yet are reaffirmed with the same intensity as to their naturalness and distinctiveness. And although such a concept of blurring and change, of ‘overlap’ and ‘shift’ (see Matza, 1969) is characteristic of all societies, I will argue that it is all the more so today, in the era of late modernity, where norms are daily contested and blurred, and where the movement in levels of social tolerance, the process of defining deviancy up, has become a part of everyday life. Moral borders, in short, blur and move with a speed that is easy to perceive and palpable in their impact.

For the critical anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, a major part of the mispresentation of culture and politics is a presumed isomorphism, the assumption that place, space and culture inhabit a coincident territory. Globally this is seen in maps which present ‘the world as a collection of “countries” … an inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each “rooted” in its proper place’ and each with ‘its own distinctive culture and society’ (1997, p. 34). On a cultural level they point to various processes which, particularly in late modernity, drastically undermine such an isomorphism: immigration – the movement of people across borders, the mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Crossing the borderline
• 2 Blurring the binary vision
• 3 The sociology of vindictiveness and the criminology of transgression
• 4 Chaos and the coordinates of order
• 5 The decline of work and the invisible servant
• 6 Social inclusion and redemption through labour
• 7 Crossing the border: to these wet and windy shores
• 8 Terrorism and anti-terrorism terrorism: the banality of evil
• 9 The exclusive community
• Conclusion: Roads to elsewhere
• Bibliography
• Index